Thoughts on the Great Games Experiment

I finally found some time to look at the Great Games Experiment today. It’s actually quite fun. It’s a social network but geared around gaming. The website has a pretty clean layout and it’s really easy to find the games you like, if they’re already listed. You can rate and comment on games at the click of a button without all that tedious Click To Confirm rubbish that Facebook and MySpace seem to love.

On the other hand, it’s also very open to rubbish and abuse. Spore has managed to rack up 69 ratings with a score of 4.7 despite not yet being launched. There really needs to be a separate section for games in development. For some reason you need to say that you’ve played the game in order to review it, but not to rate it. Where’s the sense in that? Is rating based on pure hype acceptable these days? Along this same vein, there should be a way to report the inevitable griefers. It’s all happy and nice so far but really, we’ve all seen what happens when someone even hints at PSP vs DS.

The search function is also a little crazy. I searched for Leisure Suit Larry. (While commenting all over the LucasArts games, I thought I may as well go back to the roots of my childhood gaming). It turned up Magna Cum Laude (Ugh, awful awful game), Saint’s Row, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Wildlife Tycoon: Adventure Africa and lots of other games I have never heard of and (AFAIK) bear no resemblance to the Leisure Suit Larry series. Very odd. I presume it’s searching for each individual word.

Jeff Tunnell of Making It Big In Games announced The Great Games Experiment early in March. It’s in Open Beta, like pretty much every other social-network-like site out there. I’ve spent the past half hour zipping about and commenting on my favourite and most hated games. Go ahead – do the same. Write a full review if you like. It’s a very user-friendly system. I think it’s great.

Oh yeah, final thing. As seems to be the fashion these days, you can also generate badges from the site. There’s nothing to stop you claiming that you’ve played every game in existence but hey, that’s user-generated content for you.

Links:
The Great Games Experiment
Make It Big In Games

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